by Pam Uphoff
"Just one more foal. Honest."
Code chuckled. "You're hopeless, Damien. Old Gods, I hope you're right about this place."
"It's definitely got witches. Scared the hell out of me the last time I came through."
"When was that?"
"We passed through when we first came to the West. And then, hmm, do you remember the first year all the mares foaled, so I bought two horses and, let's see, you were at the farm all year, weren't you? Yeah, I tried going over the mountains and gold mining. Found plenty, but didn't like the life."
The next morning Code prodded for more information. "Why do you think there are witches there?"
"Oh, well. See, there was this flock of sheep, and just the one teenage girl watching them all. I thought she was a bit weak to defend the flock, but when this wolf attacked, she threw something. Knocked it out. Then she sat down by the wolf and started changing it. Pretty soon a big ram got up from where the wolf had been. First it tried to kill the sheep, tearing at their wool, and then it chased them around a bit, and then it started mating with them. About the time I'd convinced myself I hadn't seen what I saw, this man came. The wolf ran away, and man took off his clothes, turned into a large black goat and went after him."
Code blinked at him. "Riiight. Umm, Damien, I know you're not from around here, but that's silly even by ignorant Veronian standards."
"It wasn't silly at all. Made my skin crawl. I hustled away quickly. And like I said, I recognized the horse farm. I've been through the village before, it just wasn't so obvious the first two times."
Code eyed him, and seemed a bit more anxious, less hopeful.
"We'll be there late tomorrow. Just remember, don't be an ass, just because she's worried the hell out of you for months."
Code sighed. "You are so damn strange. How come you never married?"
"Just lucky, I guess." And fell for a princess and could have blown the whole operation if Andrai hadn't sent me away for a year.
They got an early start the last day, with Code up and banging pans while it was still fully dark. So it was late afternoon when they crested the last hill and looked down on the colorful little village.
"Doesn't look like it's full of witches." Code muttered.
"You'll see." Damien clucked at the horses, and hoped he hadn't hallucinated all the things he'd seem. Like the tavern. It must have burned down years ago, there weren't even charred remains on the corner. But . . . that inn by Fort Crossroads . . . He looked around a bit helplessly. "Guess we'll be camping." The dry goods store was still there. He set the brake and swung down from the driver's seat and came face to face with three young women.
The one in the middle was Mihaela. "Uncle Damien?" Her eyes switched to Code as he hastily dropped off. "Daddy!" She flung herself at him for a hug. "Old Gods! Mom is going to be so upset! The witches all say they don't ever marry, and I've heard her crying herself to sleep."
"Why didn't she tell me what was happening? How could she just leave?"
Damien clapped his hand on Code's shoulder. "Here comes the lady you should be asking about that."
Vani was staring at them in disbelief. She threw a glance over her shoulder, and hustled over. Code, pale as a ghost, held out his hand. She took it and walked the rest of the way into his embrace. "I just wanted to learn. They know so much."
"You could have told me that. Told me something. Half the docks district thinks I murdered you and buried the bodies in Jeinah's garden. How could you not say anything?" A world of pain was in his voice.
Damien eyed the older women advancing on them and poked Code. "Remember everything we've talked about." Then he faded back and tried to just absorb the village street, not thinking about anything in particular.
Vani looked around and paled. "This is Curious, Elegant and Idea, Sisters of the Dark Crescent, the highest level of witchcraft. They've been teaching me everything I always wanted to know. Mihaela has grasped power, she's a witch too. She's in the Crescent Moons. I'm, well, a Full Moon, except I'm doing the beginning exercises."
The three witches looked them over for an awkward moment, before the witch in the middle spoke. "Vani, we told you about family responsibilities, and about men."
Code straightened his back, and squeezed Vani's hand. "Pleased to meet you. Was it actually necessary to lure my family off in secret? Do you constrain them, now?"
The trio straightened indignantly. "We restrain no one. Witches are free. Including free of you."
"If Vani wishes to divorce me, she may do so. That is the law of the Kingdom. I have not, as yet, received any paper work indicating that she has." Code dropped his eyes to Vani and sighed. "Can't you learn, and come back? Have I been that . . . beastly?"
Vani had tears running down her face. "They won't teach me then. They'll throw me out."
Damien cleared his throat. "It's late in the year, we won't be doing much cartage perhaps Code could stay the winter and you two can take the time to be sure of what path you are taking."
Code twitched a look his way.
Damien kept his tone mild. "Where are you living? I hope not still in that wagon, it'll be a cold winter at this altitude."
Vani shook her head. "We, I, umm, bought a lot and the witches built a house. That's the way they do it here."
"I'll find a job." Code's voice was firm. "I'll live apart, but I'll be here if you need me. If the kids need me."
They'd gathered a bit of a crowd, and a teenage boy on a chestnut horse piped up. "You could work for Nil for the winter. He needs people for all the horses and cows and sheep he's got now."
Vani and Mihaela were looking hopeful, and Dori and Sanda wiggled through the crowd and joined their parents in a tight cluster. Only the toddler Aurora was missing.
The witches looked disapprovingly at the boy on the horse, but got only a look of mild inquiry in return.
The center witch glared at Code. "Do not give orders to any witches."
The one on the right frowned at Vani. "Vani, if we find you setting an example of subservience, you will be expelled. Your status in law is your own business." They turned and stalked away, and Vani sagged in relief.
Code hugged her again, and Damien strolled away to give the family some privacy.
"Now that Harry moved the tavern, most visitors camp at the stream." The boy on the horse had followed him. "Pyrite likes your horses. He's says they're smart."
Damien decided Pyrite must be the liver chestnut the boy was riding. It was not just bare backed, but bare headed as well. "Yeah. I think he's right. Those two pinto mares Vani brought are both related to these two." Moved the Tavern? Damien remembered the inn out in the country, surrounded by freestanding dimensional gates. He hadn't seen Harry . . .
"Are you the Damien that Dori says owns them? And the wagon? They were all worried that you'd be mad at them for taking them."
"No, I'm a little mad that they didn't talk to Code, but then I've been talking at him for three weeks to get him over thinking he can order Vani around. I hope he remembers."
The boy looked thoughtful. "I can see where just going would seem simpler. But it leaves an awful lot behind that needs to be fixed, doesn't it?"
"No kidding."
"That cap does a good job. It kind of swirls your thoughts around so they look like you're not thinking of anything in particular. How does it do that?"
"It's got a bunch of little magnets . . . " Damien shut his mouth abruptly.
The boy grinned. "Don't worry, it's not very obvious. And you're hard to read anyway." He shifted his shoulder and the gelding – damn fine animal – moved off.
Damien climbed up to the driver's seat and drove back to the cold creek where he'd camped . . . twenty-six yeas ago?
Two days later they left.
Chapter Four
Late Fall 1386
Ash, Foothills Province
Code drove the closed wagon to Wallenton where Damien hired a driver to drive it the rest of the way. Code walked back to
spend the winter minding sheep, and perhaps occasionally seeing Vani and the girls.
Back in the City, he found that Marquette and Ross had returned to the farm, to get the hay in, taking one wagon and five horses with them. Max had been slowly accumulating the rest of their winter stocks. Damien added the oats he'd bought in Ash, and sold most of the wool. Andrai and Jeinah grabbed the rest, and promised to knit him a sweater.
Cordelia was delighted with the necklace he'd bought her in Ash, her tenth birthday having come and gone while he was away. She was showing all the early signs of puberty, and Andrai was watching her like a hawk. Jeff—Jeinah's oldest son was twenty-three, almost twenty-four—had enlisted in the Army. He'd been stationed at a remote fort, but had accumulated enough leave to actually get to Karista and visit over the Solstice and show off his sergeant's stripes. They were all sorry to see him go, even as they envied him a warmer winter in the south.
Despite the empty house on the middle lot, it was back to their winter routine. Hauling when the streets were clear and ships in port. Monitoring the sole agent of the One World in town. Who, as far as they could tell, was the most bored and boring man alive.
Andrai sighed. "We're really going to have to watch ourselves around these grown children. That boy could destroy us all."
Later Cordelia was sighing for a different reason. "I miss Jeff already. Uncle Damien, do you go to Fort Eden very often?"
"No, but if we start doing the gold hauls we'll be by there regularly. Eden's about halfway between Havwee and here. However, I think your mother was planning on aiming you toward the university, not at a soldier."
The girl heaved an enormous sigh. "I'm tired of school. I already know more than anyone else I know."
Damien nodded. "Yeah, you know, but the problem may not be the learning, but the people. You need to meet more smart kids your own age. Get away from your mother a bit."
She brightened at that, and Damien, after talking with some of the better merchants he made regular deliveries for, suggested the Black Hill Finishing School to Andrai.
"Finishing school?" Andrai managed to look down her nose with no difficulty at all, despite Damien's superior height.
"Jek Neally says a lot of the students go on to University. It would get her away from the docks districts and spruce up her fashion sense and eventually maybe land her a better sort of husband. Heck, the way you've been saving you've probably got a big enough dowry for a lord."
"Oh, very funny, Sergeant Malder." She stomped off, but a month later the Black Hill School became Damien's regular first stop of the morning.
It made swinging by Nicole's to check on his, no, not other family, damn it. His friend and her children. Easier. And not going there too often, harder. The weather warmed, the river ice broke and they got busy again.
At the Sooty Duck, Periti's front room absence was followed by much crying of babies.
"Triplets? Old Gods, that's quite a trick for your first try. Happy Equinox." Damien examined the three undersized bundles. At two weeks old they were still bald.
"Hope you're not expecting a family resemblance, Damien." Bert Howard snickered. "I hear the Palace has been giving her a stipend to live on. Hope they're taking it out of the Prince's allowance, to teach him some sort of lesson in responsibility."
Damien nodded vaguely. "Do they know it's triplets?"
One of the whores laughed outright. "They sent a witness, along with providing the midwife, can you imagine that?"
"Just as well, I suspect. Three of them, who'd believe, otherwise?"
However much the palace was paying her, Periti was back working by the time the triplets were three months old.
"Well, they're bigger, and it looks like they're going to have hair after all." Damien commented.
Bert shook his head. "Three little blondies. Cuter than hell."
Two days later the men wound up babysitting them while the whores had an unusually busy lunch hour. "Four Navy ships just came into port." Lala stopped by to take a peek at the slumbering babies. "Look, why don't you take them home, and we'll send Periti when she gets backs. She's meeting her Prince." Lala rolled her eyes and dashed off to greet the next sailor through the door.
Damien and Bert exchanged shrugs, and Damien drove them home. Andrai glared at them and fetched her old baby bottles while the men settled down with the babies. "And who is going to drive your wagon this afternoon, Damien?" She looked down her nose at the babies. "They don't look a thing like you, so don't you let that whore start claiming things. Next thing you know she'll have you in court paying for them."
"I'm just doing a favor for a friend, not adopting the babies, after all."
"Friend!"
"And Max will be back any day, so we can start running all four wagons again. Tony can drive, and Code should be home soon. Or we can hire another driver."
Max had taken the stage to the town nearest the farm, to collect horses and the other wagon.
"I figure I'll have to buy another horse halfway through the summer," Damien accepted a bottle from Andrai, and plugged the increasingly noisy baby in his arms. "Probably another gelding to team with Kar. I'll have to send all four mares back to the farm. Where and how the four we took to Crossroads last summer managed to get bred is anyone's guess, but they're getting much too fat to ignore."
Bert chuckled. "I've heard that one before. The Phantom Stallion of the Foothills they call him. All the carters that go that way regular-like take geldings only."
Damien snickered and transferred the boy to his shoulder (two chances out of three it was a boy), which immediately received what seemed like most of what the baby'd just drank. "I shouldn't laugh, though. And Vani'd said she'd bred Stars and Spots to a really fine animal called Sun Gold in Ash."
Bert finished up his ministration to the baby he was holding, and they did a quick paper-rock-scissors for the third baby. Damien lost and picked up, he thought, the girl. "Funny how fast they grow. Looks like she's going to be a blonde, like all the royal family."
"Ha! You're saved."
"Hardly necessary, Periti isn't about to give up on her Prince, even though she admitted to two other fellows as well, that night. Must have been a orgy or something. Didn't know the palace went in for them."
Bert bristled indignantly. "Of course they don't! Everyone knows the Prince fell in with bad company and they had, well, an orgy. But it was up in the ruins of Ba'al's temple. Which gives me the chills, I'm old enough to have seen what went on up there!" He nodded decisively.
Fed, the babies all slept.
The men played cards until Andrai chased them out and sent Damien back to work. "Idler. Bad enough you consort with whores, but I'll not see you slacking off and taking to gambling."
"Old Gods, that woman has a tongue. What did you say her husband died of?"
"Contrary to the rumor that he killed himself to escape her tongue? In a fight with some snatch-and-grab gangers, down on the dock. City Guards all over the place, but they never did catch any of the ones that got away, and they only left dead ones behind. They were after something in pile of small crates. The Guards never figured out which one, either. Good thing the water and sewers work, or I'd bitch about the taxes I pay."
Damien steered Blue and Bosco back out to the dock, and with the water running so high, had no trouble staying gainfully employed till nightfall.
Tony had picked up Cordelia, after school, and she was cooing to the three babies when he came in.
Andrai looked across at him and sniffed. "I might have known your 'friend' would leave them here all day. No doubt all night as well."
"I'll go see if she's back." Damien managed a single step backwards before she froze him in place with a look. "Or I could feed them and change their diapers."
"If you had any." Andrai tapped her foot disapprovingly.
"Umm, I could dash over to the rag lady's place?"
Andrai snorted. "You might as well start at the Sooty Duck. But if she's not coming ri
ght away, yes, the rag lady would be an excellent second stop."
"Third stop, right back here?" Damien guessed.
"After you swing by Mrs Atherson's and buy about a gallon of goat's milk, boy. And there'd better not be any alcohol on your breath."
Damien hustled down to the Duck, where he met his first problem. The bar was full of Guards. No, not the City Guards, but rather the King's Own. "Periti bring her Prince back with her?" He asked the first whore he recognized.
She raised a shocked face to him. "She's dead!"
Chapter Five
Summer Solstice 1387
Karista, Kingdom of the West
"I heard that Prince Rebo swears he didn't do it, but no matter if he did or didn't, they'll find someone to put it on."
The nearest guard shook his head. He was of medium height, with sharp eyes. "No miss. We want the man that killed her so nastily, not someone to blame. Can't have someone like that running around loose." He studied Damien in turn. "And you are?"
"Damien Malder. Got a freight delivery company." His voice sounded a bit distant and odd. Periti? The little girl whose been fetching my beer since she was about five?
"Ah. You're one of the possible other fathers, and you've got the babies right now?"
"Yes." Damien tried to pull his thoughts back into some sort of order. Obviously the man had been talking to everyone around the bar.
"Where were you this afternoon?"
"Here for lunch. After Bert and I got talked into minding the babies, we went to my place for a couple of hours. My aunt got tired of us playing cards and chased us out. I spent the rest of the afternoon on deliveries. I can give you the addresses and approximate times if you need them."
"Might as well. Sounds like you're out of contention though. She was killed shortly after noon."
So what if she was a whore's daughter and grew up to be a whore. She was happy. Loved her children. Still dreamed about her prince. Damien gave all the information he could, and was halfway home before he remembered the babies. He detoured to the shack of a woman who collected clothing too worn to be of use for much else and made, among other things, diapers. Damien bought six and wondered a bit nervously if Periti had any relatives in town. Or anywhere else, for that matter. A second detour to Mrs. Atherson who had goats and charged him for the jug as well as the milk.